The Oxygen of Amplification

Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators

Whitney Phillips

Published 05.22.18

The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online draws on in-depth interviews by scholar Whitney Phillips to showcase how news media was hijacked from 2016 to 2018 to amplify the messages of hate groups.

Offering extremely candid comments from mainstream journalists, the report provides a snapshot of an industry caught between the pressure to deliver page views, the impulse to cover manipulators and “trolls,” and the disgust (expressed in interviewees’ own words) of accidentally propagating extremist ideology.

As social and digital media are leveraged to reconfigure the information landscape, Phillips argues that this new domain requires journalists to take what they know about abuses of power and media manipulation in traditional information ecosystems; and apply and adapt that knowledge to networked actors, such as white nationalist networks online.

This work is the first practitioner-focused report from Data & Society’s Media Manipulation Initiative, which examines how groups use the participatory culture of the internet to turn the strengths of a free society into vulnerabilities.

Whitney Phillips is a digital media folklorist who has spent a decade exploring trolling, hate and misogyny online, online ethics, and folkloric ambivalence across media. She is the author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press, 2015), an ethnography of early trolling subculture, and co-author of The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online (Polity, 2017), which applies a folkloric lens to online participation. She is currently working on an ethnographic research project focused on emerging journalism practices, and in future work will continue investigating the ambivalent relationship between individuals and the folkloric collectives they navigate.